Aristotle (383 - 322 BC)
Aristotle rebelled against his mentor by asserting that the objects of the senses have autonomous existence. His world, unlike Plato’s, was a space filled with real things. Physical objects, according to Aristotle, were “composites” of form and matter where “form” constituted the properties that make the thing what it was and “matter” was the stuff of which it is made. Aristotle “was determined to grasp the universal,” David Lindberg explains, “but, unlike his teacher, Aristotle argued that one must do so by starting with the individual. Once we possess the universal definition, we can put it to use as the premise of deductive demonstrations.” These ideas underpinned a method of inquiry that merged an inductive empirical component with a deductive rational component that proceeded with Euclidean precision from what Lindberg calls “universal definitions as premises”. Aristotle built his system of the world with this method of discovery.
Aristotle’s universe was orderly and predictable–and therefore amenable to scientific examination–because the objects in it obeyed what might be described as laws of their nature. “Experiment reveals nothing about natures that we cannot learn better in some other way,” Lindberg explains. “Aristotle’s scientific practice is not to be explained, therefore, as a result of stupidity or deficiency on his part–failure to perceive an obvious procedural improvement–but as a method compatible with the world as he perceived it and well suited to the questions that interested him.” Since in his view the nature of the object governed the processes by which it changed from one state to another, enlightened scientists came to dismiss Aristotle’s philosophy as unscientific metaphysics.
This was not an unfair characterization. Aristotle analyzed change in terms of four factors: the form of the thing changing, the matter that constitutes it; the agency that produces the change, and the purpose of the change. These were for Aristotle, the formal cause, the material cause, the efficient cause, and the final cause. Equating the final cause of an object, or a change in its state, to an impulse connected to its nature made Aristotle’s system teleological. That is to say, his universe was purposeful.
Aristotle’s system can with some justification be interpreted as a response to the atomism of Leucippus and Democritus. The world they postulated consisted of an infinite number of atomic corpuscles in an endless void. Change occurred at random as atoms collided, gathered and dispersed. The diversity of nature was the consequence of a continuum of purposeless accidents. “What is important about the atomists,” Lindberg notes, “is their vision of reality as a lifeless piece of machinery, in which everything that occurs is the necessary outcome of inert, material atoms moving according to their nature. No mind and no divinity intrude into the world. Life itself is reduced to the motions of inert corpuscles. There is no room for purpose or freedom; iron necessity alone rules. This mechanistic world view would fall out of favor with Plato and Aristotle and their followers; but it returned with a vengeance (and with a few novel twists) in the seventeenth century and had been a powerful force in scientific discussion ever since.”
The inability of Aristotle’s method of discovery to produce accurate accounts of nature’s processes undermined its usefulness as a scientific tool. This in turn undermined his metaphysics. This in turn undermined his idea that the universe is purposeful. This chain reaction had intellectual consequences that went far beyond the scientific issues which ignited the controversy. Arthur O. Lovejoy alludes to this phenomenon in his discussion of the work done by historians of ideas. “It is in the persistent dynamic factors, the ideas that produce effects in the history of thought, that he is especially interested,” Lovejoy explains. “Now a formulated doctrine is sometimes a relatively inert thing. The conclusion reached by a process of thought is also not infrequently the conclusion of the process of thought. The more significant factor in the matter may be, not the dogma which certain persons proclaim–be that single or manifold in its meaning– but the motives or reasons which have led them to it. And motives and reasons partly identical may contribute to the production of very diverse conclusions, and the same substantive conclusions may, at
different periods or in different minds, be generated by entirely distinct logic or other motives.”46 “These large movements and tendencies, then,” Lovejoy continues, “these conventionally labelled -isms, are not as a rule the ultimate objects of the interest of the historian of ideas; they are merely the initial materials.”
The rebellion against Aristotelianism can be interpreted within Lovejoy’s history of ideas as a rebellion against a style of thinking–the emergence of a new “logic”. The objectivity of its scientific component gave legitimacy to parts that had no particular scientific significance
or value. The modernization of the methods of science that began in the sixteenth century was followed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for example, by enlightened revolutions in the arts and in politics. These revolutions were not led by scientists whose investigations had been hampered by Aristotle’s teleological philosophy. They were led by new members of the thinking class, individuals who were eager to advance their own opinions about the world and man’s place in it. Like seamen rushing to refit an old ship for a new voyage, they pulled down the old Aristotelian rigging and pushed it overboard without actually testing it.
That there was nothing wrong with Aristotle’s analyses of society and government–apart that is from the style of his thinking–is suggested by the willingness of the eighteenth century’s political theorists to build their systems on his conclusions that happiness is the highest good and that the object of government is to promote it. John Adams, who surely studied Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics, did this. In his Thoughts on Government, Adams asserted that “we ought to consider what is the end of government, before we determine which is the best form. Upon this point all speculative politicians will agree, that the happiness of the individual is the end of man. From this principle will follow that the form of government which communicates ease, comfort, security, or, in one word, happiness, to the greatest number of persons, and in the greatest degree, is best.”48 Adams’ appeal to the Aristotelian end as the ultimate standard by which to evaluate government restores an important measure of lost authority to Aristotle’s teleological political science. Enough anyway to use it as a platform from which to inspect the hull of the new vessel. That is, for current purposes, it provides a lens to view the idiosyncracies of the style of thinking that caused the eighteenth century to become what Karl Becker called the Era of Revolutions. Thomas Jefferson’s development as a political thinker serves as a case study in this process.
Aristotle counted happiness as “the best, the finest, the most pleasurable thing of all.”49 It was the “supreme good”. He described it as “a kind of virtuous activity of the soul” that “demands not only complete goodness but a complete life.”50 It was “the realization and perfect exercise of excellence.”51 “The happy man,” Aristotle said, “will have the required quality, and in fact will be happy throughout his life; because he will spend all his time, or the most time of any man, in virtuous conduct and contemplation.”52 The happy man is “one who is active in accordance with complete virtue, and who is adequately furnished with external goods, and that not for some unspecified period but throughout a complete life.”53
Besides being the highest human good, Aristotle considered happiness to be the principle objective of human society “for a state is a community of equals aiming at the best possible life.”54 These two components, the achievement of happiness and the society men form in order to achieve it, constituted for Aristotle an organic whole. As a political scientist, Aristotle set himself the task of evaluating existing societies in terms of this organic synergy. “Presumably this would be the most authoritative and directive science,” Aristotle observed. “Clearly this description fits the science of politics; for it is political science that prescribes what subjects are to be taught in states, and which of these the different sections of the community are to learn.”55 And for what purpose? “The good for man,” Aristotle answers. “For even if the good of the community coincides with that of the individual,” Aristotle reasoned, “it is clearly a greater and more perfect thing to achieve and preserve that of a community; for while it is desirable to secure what is good in the case of an individual, to do so in the case of a people or a state is something finer and more sublime.”56
“Every state is a community of some kind,” Aristotle continued, “and every community is established with a view to some good, for everyone always acts in order to obtain that which they think good. But, if all communities aim at some good, the state or political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest good.”57 In keeping with this teleological reasoning, Aristotle asserted that “a city can be excellent only when the citizens who have a share in its government are excellent.”58 And so, the best form of government, “under which the state will be most happy (and happiness,
as has been already said, cannot exist without excellence),”59 is administered by “men who are just absolutely, and not merely relatively to the principle of the constitution.”60 These men, Aristotle asserted, “must not lead the life of artisans or tradesmen, for such a life is ignoble and inimical to excellence. Neither must they be farmers, since leisure is necessary both for the development of excellence and the performance of political duties."
It is not surprising that none of the many states that Aristotle studied perfectly fulfilled his conditions for excellence. But why did they
have different forms of government? “Now,” Aristotle observed,
“whereas happiness is the highest good, being a realization and perfect practice of excellence, the various qualities of men are clearly the reason why there are various kinds of states and many forms of government, for different men seek after happiness in different ways and by different means, and so make for themselves different modes of life and forms of government.”62
The “state” was for Aristotle a “political community” that seemed to rise in a progression of natural growth out of the family and the village. Aristotle defined the form of the state in terms of the criteria it set out for its office holders. “The distribution of offices according to excellence,” he explained, “is a special characteristic of aristocracy, for the principle of an aristocracy is excellence as wealth is of an oligarchy, and freedom is of democracy. In all of them of course exists the right of the majority, and whatever seems good to the majority of those who share in the government has authority, whether in an oligarchy, or aristocracy or a democracy.”63 In addition to aristocracy, oligarchy and democracy, Aristotle recognized monarchy, polity and tyranny as forms of government. “Polity or constitutional government,” Aristotle explained, “may be described generally as a fusion of oligarchy and democracy, but the term is usually applied to those forms of government which incline towards democracy, and the term aristocracy to those which incline towards oligarchy, because birth and education are commonly the accompaniment of wealth.”64 Tyranny was for Aristotle the antithesis of polity.
Aristotle distinguished between citizens of a state and the members of its general population. Those who shared in the government were citizens. Who these men were depended on the form of the government. In an aristocracy, men qualified for citizenship by their moral virtue–their excellence. In an oligarchy, men qualified for citizenship by their wealth. In a democracy, men qualified for citizenship by their freedom. In constitutional government, men qualified for citizenship by combinations of these criteria. In monarchies and tyrannies, where the authority of the government rested with an individual, it is not clear which of its other inhabitants qualified for citizenship. Those who lacked the particular qualifications for citizenship in a particular state had no say in its government and their interests were not considered in defining the common good or enacting laws to accomplish it.
Aristotle differentiated between the classes of men who resided within the state. “Besides differences in wealth there are differences in rank and merit, and there are some other elements which were mentioned by us when in treating of aristocracy we enumerated the essentials of a state.”65 There were among the inhabitants of Aristotle’s state some few who were better men. These were men who had developed practical wisdom and therefore lived by the golden mean. “To judge by their lives,” Aristotle observed, “the masses and the most vulgar seem–not unreasonably–to believe that the Good or happiness is pleasure. Accordingly they ask for nothing better than the life of enjoyment. (Broadly speaking, there are three main types of life: the one just mentioned, the political, and thirdly the contemplative.) The utter servility of the masses,” Aristotle noted caustically, “comes out in their preference for a bovine existence.”66 These base characters, lacking in practical wisdom, could not communicate its benefits to the state or lead its citizens to happiness. Government by these sorts could not therefore be the best. “The best,” Aristotle reasoned, “must be that which is administered by the best, and in which there is one man, or a whole family, or many persons, excelling all the others together in excellence, and both rulers and subjects are fitted, the one to rule, the other to be ruled, in such a manner as to attain the most desirable life.”67 Among the responsibilities of the statesman was the instruction of the young in the ways of excellence. “For the same things are best both for individuals and for states,” Aristotle explained, “and these are the things which the legislator ought to implant in the minds of his citizens.”68
Aristotle would have been puzzled by the focus of the eighteenth century’s practitioners of the science of politics on political rights rather than excellence. While he accepted that the majority of those who shared the government should decide its policies, he did not
conceptualize the exercise in terms of its political characteristics. Perhaps for this reason he did not discuss the rights of citizens to participate in it. But then Aristotle was not a political advocate molding public opinion on behalf of a political program. He was merely an observer undertaking to bring an unstudied subject into rational order. He evidently discovered in the course of his review that although different governments had different forms and practices they all (with the exception of absolute monarchies and tyrannies) accepted the judgement of the majority of their citizens. In some instances these were deliberations of aristocrats only. In some instances they included
only oligarches. In some cases they included all free men. Presumably these deliberations produced policies that contented the citizens of the particular state, but Aristotle does not say so specifically. Nor does he discuss how these various deliberations were conducted. This was apparently not necessary in Aristotle’s view because his subject was not the political process itself but its objective.
